Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the fact that various banking apps here in Thailand now they are asking for people's locations, when you are using your banking app. 

You know, this is the thing. All of this digitization was predicated on "it is all going to be so easy, it’s going to be so efficient; you are going to be able to do it from home; you are not going to have to come in and deal with the annoying bureaucracy of Thailand's Banks - which anybody that has been here longer than about 5 years knows how that works - but everything has turned out to be the exact opposite. It's gotten worse. You have to go in now and deal with frozen accounts that you never had to deal with before, Biometrics. If your phone number isn't aligned with your passport, and it isn't aligned with your banking documentation, and your account is frozen until it is fixed. And then nobody can ever quite fix it, and nobody can quite answer why, or if a "mule account", whatever that is, transfers your account money, they can freeze it, then you are stuck with it being frozen for months on end. It is just nonsense. It is Kafkaesque at best and basically Orwellian at worst and it is somewhere on that spectrum, none of which is a place we want to be. 

That being said, I thought of making this video after reading a recent email actually from a viewer, quoting: "Hi, I just wanted to bring up that (I'm going to leave the bank's name out) that my Big Bank app is now asking permission to know my location. I know that you keep up with banking regulations on your YouTube channel." Well that's the thing, these aren't really regulations, are they? They are just "oh, we are interacting with the OECD now", and "oh the Bank of Thailand just says we need to do this now" - it's apropos of what? Where is the due process for any of this? And when did the Bank of Thailand become our nanny-minders? We are free people; we are Thai people. Why are they monitoring our location because we want to transfer 20,000 Baht to buy something on the Internet? Quoting further: "I thought you might know something about this or if not bring it to your attention. Subscriber and avid follow. Please keep up your excellent channel content." Thank you too; tip of the hat to you sir. Thanks very much for sending me that. 

Yeah, long story short, yet again, just another example of more overreach, more nanny-mindering, more totalitarianism and more of this "ease of banking" we were all promised associated with all this digitization in the context of banking here in the Kingdom of Thailand.